Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the behind-the-scenes department: An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Do you remember Facebook Watch? Me neither. Mark Zuckerberg's short-lived streaming service never really got off the ground, but court filings unsealed in Meta's antitrust lawsuit claim "Watch" was kneecapped starting in 2018 to protect Zuckerberg's advertising relationship with Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. "For nearly a decade, Netflix and Facebook enjoyed a special relationship," said plaintiffs in filings (PDF) made public on Saturday. "It is no great mystery how this close partnership developed, and who was its steward: from 2011-2019, Netflix's then-CEO Hastings sat on Facebook's board and personally directed the companies' relationship"
The filings detail Hastings' uncomfortably close relationship with Meta's upper management, including Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. During these years, Netflix was allegedly granted special access to Facebook users' private message inboxes, among other privileged analytics tools, in exchange for hundred-million-dollar advertising deals. This gave Facebook greater dominance in its all-important ad division, plaintiffs allege, so the company was fine to retreat from Netflix's streaming territory by shuttering Watch. In 2017, Facebook Watch began signing deals to populate its streaming service with original TV Shows from movie stars such as Bill Murray. A year later, the service attempted to license the popular '90s TV show Dawson's Creek. Facebook Watch had meaningful reach on the home screen of the social media platform, and an impressive budget as well. Facebook and Netflix appeared ready to butt heads in the streaming world, and the Netflix cofounder found himself in the middle as a Facebook board member. [...]
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Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the sanctions-clamp-down department: According to Bloomberg, the U.S. and U.K. are investigating more than $20 billion worth of USDT transactions that have passed through Garantex, a Russia-based crypto exchange. Milk Road reports: If confirmed, the $20 billion in transactions would represent one of the most significant breaches of the sanctions imposed on Russia since the conflict began. However, the sources cautioned that the inquiries are ongoing and that it is too early to draw conclusions given the complexity of crypto transactions. They also noted that there was no immediate suggestion of wrongdoing by Tether.
Key points:
- The transactions under scrutiny were conducted using Tether (USDT).
- The US and UK sanctioned Garantex on suspicion of facilitating financial crimes and illicit transactions in Russia.
- The $20 billion USDT transactions would represent one of the biggest breaches of sanctions imposed on Russia since the start of the war.
- Tether froze assets of entities on the U.S. sanctions list.
Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the cause-and-effect department: Michael Larabel reports via Phoronix: Given the recent change by Redis to adopt dual source-available licensing for all their releases moving forward (Redis Source Available License v2 and Server Side Public License v1), the Linux Foundation announced today their fork of Redis. The Linux Foundation went public today with their intent to fork Valkey as an open-source alternative to the Redis in-memory store. Due to the Redis licensing changes, Valkey is forking from Redis 7.2.4 and will maintain a BSD 3-clause license. Google, AWS, Oracle, and others are helping form this new Valkey project.
The Linux Foundation press release shares: "To continue improving on this important technology and allow for unfettered distribution of the project, the community created Valkey, an open source high performance key-value store. Valkey supports the Linux, macOS, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and FreeBSD platforms. In addition, the community will continue working on its existing roadmap including new features such as a more reliable slot migration, dramatic scalability and stability improvements to the clustering system, multi-threaded performance improvements, triggers, new commands, vector search support, and more. Industry participants, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Oracle, Ericsson, and Snap Inc. are supporting Valkey. They are focused on making contributions that support the long-term health and viability of the project so that everyone can benefit from it."
Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the AI-revolution department: An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The White House has announced the "first government-wide policy (PDF) to mitigate risks of artificial intelligence (AI) and harness its benefits." To coordinate these efforts, every federal agency must appoint a chief AI officer with "significant expertise in AI." Some agencies have already appointed chief AI officers, but any agency that has not must appoint a senior official over the next 60 days. If an official already appointed as a chief AI officer does not have the necessary authority to coordinate AI use in the agency, they must be granted additional authority or else a new chief AI officer must be named.
Ideal candidates, the White House recommended, might include chief information officers, chief data officers, or chief technology officers, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) policy said. As chief AI officers, appointees will serve as senior advisers on AI initiatives, monitoring and inventorying all agency uses of AI. They must conduct risk assessments to consider whether any AI uses are impacting "safety, security, civil rights, civil liberties, privacy, democratic values, human rights, equal opportunities, worker well-being, access to critical resources and services, agency trust and credibility, and market competition," OMB said. Perhaps most urgently, by December 1, the officers must correct all non-compliant AI uses in government, unless an extension of up to one year is granted.
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Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the up-next department: An anonymous reader writes: What if you could update the device while it's still in the box? That's the latest plan cooked up by Apple, which is close to rolling out a system that will let Apple Stores wirelessly update new iPhones while they're still in their boxes. The new system is called "Presto." French site iGeneration has the first picture of what this setup looks like. It starts with a clearly Apple-designed silver rack that holds iPhones and has a few lights on the front. The site (through translation) calls the device a "toaster," and yes, it looks like a toaster oven or food heating rack.
Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has been writing about whispers of this project for months, saying in one article that the device can "wirelessly turn on the iPhone, update its software and then power it back down -- all without the phone's packaging ever being opened." In another article, he wrote that the device uses "MagSafe and other wireless technologies." The iGeneration report also mentions that the device uses NFC, and there are "templates" that help with positioning the various-sized iPhone boxes so the NFC and wireless charging will work. With that wireless charging, downloading, and installing, all while being isolated in a cardboard box, Apple's "toaster" probably gets pretty hot.
Posted by from MMO Champion
World of Warcraft Spring Sale 2024
Originally Posted by Blizzard
(
Blue Tracker /
Official Forums)
Spring showers bring April flowers, and new deals are blooming! Freshen up your collection and savor sweet savings during the World of Warcraft® Spring Sale through April 8.
1 The Spring Supreme Pet Pack
2 is raining cats, dogs, and more! Throw an adorable pet party by inviting all 17 World of Warcraft pets in the Battle.net® shop to your collection for up to 65% off!
Alterac Brew-Pup
Anima Wyrmling
Argi
Blinky
Blossoming Ancient
Brightpaw
Cinder Kitten
Daisy
Dread Hatchling
Lil'Ragnaros
Lil' Ursoc
Lucky Quilen Cub
Shadow
Soul of the Aspects
Twilight
Whomper
Murkastrasza
If you already have one or more pets from The Spring Supreme Pet Pack, the pack's price will automatically adjust to reflect only the missing pets.
Get Your Pets
You can also swim through the skies atop the
Wondrous Wavewhisker flying mount and command a pair of brutal beasts with
The Mighty Kodo Pack—featuring the Armor Siege Kodo ground mount and Crushhoof pet—both are 50% off during the sale.
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Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the shape-of-things-to-come department: Silicon Valley chiefs are swarming the Capitol to try to sway lawmakers on the dangers of falling behind in the AI race. From a report: In recent weeks, American lawmakers have moved to ban the Chinese-owned app TikTok. President Biden reinforced his commitment to overcome China's rise in tech. And the Chinese government added chips from Intel and AMD to a blacklist of imports. Now, as the tech and economic cold war between the United States and China accelerates, Silicon Valley's leaders are capitalizing on the strife with a lobbying push for their interests in another promising field of technology: artificial intelligence.
On May 1, more than 100 tech chiefs and investors, including Alex Karp, the head of the defense contractor Palantir, and Roelof Botha, the managing partner of the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, will come to Washington for a daylong conference and private dinner focused on drumming up more hawkishness toward China's progress in A.I. Dozens of lawmakers, including Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, will also attend the event, the Hill & Valley Forum, which will include fireside chats and keynote discussions with members of a new House A.I. task force.
Tech executives plan to use the event to directly lobby against A.I. regulations that they consider onerous, as well as ask for more government spending on the technology and research to support its development. They also plan to ask to relax immigration restrictions to bring more A.I. experts to the United States. The event highlights an unusual area of agreement between Washington and Silicon Valley, which have long clashed on topics like data privacy, children's online protections and even China.
Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the how-about-that department: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, writing for ComputerWorld: Essentially, all software is built using open source. By Synopsys' count, 96% of all codebases contain open-source software. Lately, though, there's been a very disturbing trend. A company will make its program using open source, make millions from it, and then -- and only then -- switch licenses, leaving their contributors, customers, and partners in the lurch as they try to grab billions. I'm sick of it. The latest IT melodrama baddie is Redis. Its program, which goes by the same name, is an extremely popular in-memory database. (Unless you're a developer, chances are you've never heard of it.) One recent valuation shows Redis to be worth about $2 billion -- even without an AI play! That, anyone can understand.
What did it do? To quote Redis: "Beginning today, all future versions of Redis will be released with source-available licenses. Starting with Redis 7.4, Redis will be dual-licensed under the Redis Source Available License (RSALv2) and Server Side Public License (SSPLv1). Consequently, Redis will no longer be distributed under the three-clause Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD)." For those of you who aren't open-source licensing experts, this means developers can no longer use Redis' code. Sure, they can look at it, but they can't export, borrow from, or touch it.
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